Two Harvard Medical School doctors have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging their research articles were unlawfully removed from a government-run patient safety website due to references to LGBTQ individuals.
Drs. Celeste Royce and Gordon Schiff, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), lodged the case in a Boston federal court on Tuesday. They claim their work was deleted from the Patient Safety Network (PSNet), a platform managed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality under the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), following an executive order issued by former President Donald Trump. The order, signed on 20 January, mandates the removal of content promoting what it refers to as “gender ideology.”
The lawsuit contends that the administration’s actions violated the First Amendment by restricting free expression in a government-managed forum open to private contributors. It also alleges a breach of the Administrative Procedure Act, arguing that the articles were removed without a valid justification.
“Censoring information about transgender people or anyone a politician does not like, who have documented increased risks of negative health outcomes, is antithetical to the very mission of public health,” Schiff said in a statement.
The articles in question included one co-authored by Royce on endometriosis, which mentioned the condition’s diagnosis in transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals. Another, co-authored by Schiff, addressed failures in suicide risk assessments in healthcare settings and referenced higher suicide rates among LGBTQ communities.
Trump’s executive order was followed by a directive from the US Office of Personnel Management instructing agencies to remove mentions of “gender ideology” from government websites and social media. Shortly after, the two doctors’ articles were taken down.
A similar lawsuit by medical advocacy group Doctors for America led to a federal judge in Washington temporarily halting the removal of certain websites by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on 11 February.
The case, Schiff, et al. v. US Office of Personnel Management, et al., is being heard in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts (No. 25-cv-10595). The plaintiffs are represented by Jessie Rossman of the ACLU of Massachusetts, Scarlet Kim of the ACLU Foundation, and Ben Menke of Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic.
